Quote of the Day 2

Charging different amounts based on the hardware is like charging people different prices for listening to the same music on headphones vs. speakers.

Comes from this explanation (if you can call it that) of the NYT's new paywall.

For starters, the plan is confusing. You get 20 page views for free. You can also get around the paywall five times per day if you come via a search engine. Or are reading one of their blogs. Or come via a link from another site, which might mean I can link to NYT stories, but why risk it? Top news is sorta free and certain stories might be free. Maybe. Then, if you're a paper subscriber you get the website for free. Okay, so what's the paywall. For $15 for every four weeks (not every month), you get access to everything on a laptop/desktop or a smartphone. But not an iPad (um, unless you use a browser, I guess). For $5 more you lose the smartphone access, but gain iPad/tablet access. Huh? Exactly. For $35 every four weeks you can get the NY Times on both a smartphone and the iPad. Oh, and if you pay, you still see all the ads. And, finally, this is the introductory pricing. Who the hell knows what the final pricing is. So sign up and expect to have to pay more later. Isn't that appealing?

So many things aren't clear to me about how this is going to work. Last week I learned that (for the most part) articles accessed through Twitter links are free. But for some reason arranging them all in one logical place on Twitter is out of bounds. This is an especially grating feature of the policy from a library perspective.

We live in a strange time where the leading industry in information technology is devising ways to make information less accessible especially to people without the means to pay for it. I'm going to keep trying to find ways around that for as long as I can. My Android NYT app wants to update right now. I'm wondering if I can keep reading for free if I refuse to do so. Also can I still get everything via rss?